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hi,
my brother is looking into getting a Media centre PC to go along with his new 40" rear projection HD TV. i said i would look into pricing one up for him and see if i could built one. only problem is it seems a little more complicated than i thought. so does anyone know of any good guides around on what kind of specs a Media PC needs?
I haven't checked into the specs, but if you are wanting to put Windows XP Media Center edition on it, that is only available to OEMs from what I have seen. End users cannot buy it without a PC - only XP Home and XP Pro are available.
your right! but it looks like i can buy it OEM without a computer;
http://www.cclonline.com/product-inf...956&pc=froogle
As long as you can get MEC drivers for the hardware, then you shouldn't have too many problems, epecially with MCE2005. The vast majority of TV tuner cards have MCE drivers now, and I don't hear of many propblems with installing it these days.
I'll be installing it myself in the next few days :)
yeah I’m sure i will be able to figure it out and get it working. only problem is i don't know what hardware is needed.
A reasonably fast CPU (At least an AMD 3500, or whatever the equivalent Intel is)
A mid to high-end graphics card (Nvidia 6600 or ATI X800 or above)
1 GB of RAM
A TV tuner card, or preferably two.
Lots of hard drive space - recording video really eats disk space. I would consider 250GB a bare minimum.
i have lying around a 3GHz P4 HT and the Asus Mobo to go along with it. only problem is that the P4 one of the older sockets(it's a Northwood) and i assume you need a mico ATX board for a media centre to keep it as small as possible. also i have a 6600GT, again lying around, but don't know if it is very suitable as those cards run Very hot due to a very high clock speed. and the last thing i have going spare is 1.5GB DDR3200 so that should be fine. and as HD's are so cheap i think i might get 2x300GB as that’s only about £140. TV cards i can probably look into my self. the problem that I’m not sure about is what mobo to use? can i use standard PC parts(ie. HD's,Gfx cards) in a small media centre case? and is there any special cooling needs that i might need to look into?
P.S. on a side note i can never work out why media centres are always so high end? my old PC with a 450MHz P3 can run videos fine. and with my TV card in my current PC it only takes up about 5-10% of the CPU. also on board gfx can display TV fine.
Ditto to Nick's suggestion ^^^^
Does his TV have a DVI socket? will you require a HDMI adapter? not sure if HD TV Cards are available yet.
I'd ditto the drive space too, it's pretty cheap nowadays anyhoo, should be around £60 for a 250gb drive if you know where to look. ;)
Liam
I think the reason that a lot of MCE computers are highly specified is that people use them for viseo editing and stuff, where you do need some fast components. But iff all you want to do is use it to play music, videos and a PVR, then it isn't necessary to go all that high end.
It's entirely up to you whether you want to try and fit the components into a small format case, but there is absolutely no reason why you need to.
well i might give him the option then. i can use a normal case and build a good media centre PC in a standard case for about £400 as i have most of the parts already. or, as i suspect, he wants a small 'sleek' looking media centre to fit in with his SKY+ box etc then it could end up costing £600+.
and Liam i have not got any TV cards for his comp yet so i will have to do some research into the best. as i said the TV is HD and that’s what picture he will want eventually but i think it's too early to buy HD stuff and as you said most of that stuff doesn’t even exist yet. also as he is in England HD isn't very easy to come across. Sky’s HD is far to expensive for what you get at the moment and HD DVD's/Blu-Ray is still a bit off. it may just be best for him to upgrade when HD is more widespread and cheaper.
This card has been getting rave reviews - I haven't seen a single criticism of it:
http://tven.terratec.net/modules.php...rticle&sid=240
It has dual digital tuners for little more than the cost of a single tuner card. Note that it is available as PCI-express only though.
looks nice. but i will need one that can receive digital satellite ie. SKY, and from what i read it's only digital terrestrial TV.
EDIT: actually now i think about it can you get 5.1 sound with the right TV card and Sound card? if you have SKY+ then you get 5.1 sound on some channels and i was wondering if you could still get this with a satellite TV card?
You'd have to check the specs of the individual card for that, but I would have thought that if it's transmitted as 5.1 then the card ought to be capable of receiving it. Unfortunately your choice is going to be a lot more limited, there only seem to be a handful of cards around that can handle sattelite.
That's what I was reading just the other day in PCMagazine; Louderback writes:Quote:
Originally Posted by jdc2000
Here's the column.Quote:
Let's start with Microsoft. Windows XP Media Center Edition's been out for years, but you still can't (officially, at least) build it into your own PC. I've tried and tried to get a boxed copy, but Microsoft refuses to comply, saying it's only for OEMs, because of the variable "quality of experience."
Can the OEM WMC be taken from one computer to another, or is it one-use-only?
Quote:
Originally Posted by lgbpop
I'm pretty certain that it would be the same as any other OEM version of Windows, and that it officially lives and dies with the motherboard.
Of course MCE is an interim product really, the Media Centre facilities will be built into some of the versions of Vista when it's released. Retail versions of Vits will be transferrable.